Department of Music

“Construction: From Temple Adat Shalom to Bailey Temple and the Black Gospel Hammond Sound” a colloquium by Ashon Crawley on Friday, November 12th at 3:30pm in 107 Old Cabell Hall.

 

Description from Ashon Crawley:

“What is the construction of a Synagogue with a white congregation to the Black Church? And how can sound get us to think this relation? In 1972 Bailey Temple Church of God in Christ moved to a former synagogue on Curtis Street in Detroit, a move—it turns out—lots of black churches made in urban centers because of white flight: Newark, Brooklyn, Detroit, Chicago. And a lot of the popular gospel albums—like the “Pure Gold” album recorded at Bailey live, featuring Twinkie Clark’s musicianship—have the sound of the Hammond as a dominant. In this talk, pulled from my ongoing research with and writing about the Hammond organ, a book tentatively titled, “Made Instrument,” I argue that the construction of buildings, the space in which the Hammond is heard, impacts the acoustics, the resonance, the feel, how the instrument is heard in particular space and time. And this all impacts how congregants move in and with it.”

 

 

Ashon Crawley is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. He is author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press), an investigation of aesthetics and performance as modes of collective, social imagination and The Lonely Letters, an exploration of the interrelation of blackness, mysticism, quantum mechanics and love, to be published with Duke University Press in 2020. He is currently working on a third book, tentatively titled "Made Instrument," about the role of the Hammond Organ in the institutional and historic Black Church, in Black sacred practice and in Black social life more broadly. All his work is about otherwise possibility.